2 ms·
I think most scifi (that isn't just action adventure) tries to reframe the problems of today in a different context for the purposes of social commentary. Despi
by bawolff 18d ago
I think most scifi (that isn't just action adventure) tries to reframe the problems of today in a different context for the purposes of social commentary. Despite the future setting, it is fundamentally a genre about the present.
If the point of your book is to show X is bad, taking X to the extreme is of course going to have to result in a bad outcome. That is the entire point. Not doing that would be like writing a romance without the romantic lead.
That doesn't mean we can't have hope. A warning is one of the most hopeful things: It means we still have time to change our ways.
- t-3 18d ago> I think most scifi (that isn't just action adventure) tries to reframe the problems of today in a different context for the purposes of social commentary. Despite the future setting, it is fundamentally a genre about the present. Allegory is allegory whatever the setting. The genre is just the setting. Some settings are more useful for allegories than others, but that's very specific to the culture and literary tradition that produces the work. Eg. fantasy writers in western countries pretty much never use the setting for allegory, they use scifi more often. Writers from China that I've seen are the opposite, almost every other work in xianxia is deeply political, but the scifi is just scifi.
- bawolff 17d agoI'd say that genere is a lot more than setting
- t-3 15d agoCan you elaborate? Genre in practice is a short description of the type of the story. A genre such as "Western" or "Historical Fiction" or "Fantasy" define many things about the setting. Some, like "Romance" don't necessarily seem to define settings, but in practice the subspace of settings used in romance novels matches the space of genres which explicitly define their setting; "Romance" is not the only genre they occupy.